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ese boots lay in the leather suitcase
of -year-old toolmaker William
Henry Allen. Like many third-class
passengers, he did not survive.
modern shipping industry, the experts painted a
gruesome portrait of Titanic's death throes.
e ship sideswiped the iceberg at 11:40 p.m.,
buckling portions of the starboard hull along
a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward
watertight compartments to the sea. From this
moment onward, sinking was a certainty. e
demise may have been hastened, however, when
crewmen pushed open a gangway door on the
port side in an aborted attempt to load lifeboats
from a lower level. Since the ship had begun list-
ing to port, they could not reclose the massive
door against gravity, and by 1:50 a.m., the bow
had settled enough to allow seawater to rush in
through the gangway.
By 2:18, with the last lifeboat having departed
13 minutes earlier, the bow had lled with water
and the stern had risen high enough into the air
to expose the propellers and create catastrophic
stresses on the middle of the ship. Then the
Titanic cracked in half.
Cameron stood up and demonstrated how
it happened. He grabbed a banana and began
to wrench it in his hands: "Watch how it exes
and pooches in the middle before it breaks---see
that?" e banana skin at the bottom, which was
supposed to represent the doubly reinforced bot-
tom of the hull, was the last part to snap.
Once released from the stern section, the
bow shot for the bottom at a fairly steep angle.
Gaining velocity as it dropped, parts began to
shear away: Funnels snapped. e wheelhouse
crumbled. Finally, a er ve minutes of relent-
less descent, the bow nosed into the mud with
such massive force that its ejecta patterns are
still visible on the sea oor today.
The stern, lacking a hydrodynamic lead-
ing edge like the bow, descended even more
traumatically, tumbling and cork-
screwing as it fell. A large forward
section, already weakened by the
fracture at the surface, completely dis-
integrated, spitting its contents into the abyss.
Compartments exploded. Decks pancaked. Hull
plates ripped out. e poop deck twisted back
over itself. Heavier pieces such as the boilers
dropped straight down, while other pieces were